


Shadows the Sun Made

by kalypsobean



Category: The Imitation Game (2014)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-05 00:53:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4159440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/kalypsobean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing that gets Peter is not that he had to do it, but that he can't tell anyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadows the Sun Made

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alley_Skywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/gifts).



It hits him one day out of the blue, long after his mother has cried and they all stood in her backyard and talked about him like he'd just left and might come back, when the war was over. He's doing something mundane, clearly easy to forget since the moment after the thought is just his mind whirring away at nothing, a blackboard coated with dust but no impression of the writing that was there before.

He can't ever tell his mum that he had to stand by and let his brother die, or that he tried to stop it and they had to hold him back. Nobody outside that room will ever know, and he can't see them; doesn't know if they lie awake at night imagining the screams as the people who could have been saved but weren't were blown up or drowned or cut to pieces on barbed wire or taken prisoner and left to die, choking on air that tasted like nothing, like dry ash, like death. 

 

It stays with him, like an invisible holster over his carefully pressed shirts, a thing he carries that weighs him down, changes how he moves and thinks but stays hidden from everyone else. Nobody he spends time with now knew him before, when he was just a kid, really. Sometimes, though, Birmingham doesn't feel far enough away; the sky is still the same light grey overcast that makes even summer feel dreary, the buildings are all still utilitarian red bricks, probably fired from clay from the same pit, dug up by the same poor sod stuck with that job. He imagines it sometimes, what it would be like to have ended up there instead of here, coming home at the same time every day with his sleeves stained with dirt that didn't splatter far enough to reach his coveralls. No matter how hard he tries, though, he can't quite picture it; the things he knows, the things he's done, don't fit under a labourer's cap, and his hands are too stained with blood to hold on to a shovel, even to bury his dead.

 

It was the worst thing that could have been done to them, he thinks, to have it all swept up and burned. His mum turned to him once, her eyes misted and shining, and said, "Wouldn't it be nice if your brother was here? He'd love this." He had mumbled something, but he hadn't ever come up with the right thing to say. It's easier for her to understand what his brother did, fitting him into the newsreel pictures of jaunty men loading trucks and firing guns in disjointed, sped up film-time. He wouldn't be surprised if she remembered him like that. All she knows of what he did was that he was gone, doing something for the Foreign Office; his letters would have gotten to her coated in black, if at all, though he still wrote them because back then he thought if he wrote it all out it would feel like he wasn't alone.

Now, even that small catharsis is lost to him, the same way their work is gone; without it they're scattered, discrete. It hit Turing hard, too, but that was years ago now, and even if he knew where the others were, he's not sure that they'd want to go back, even just to have a moment like the one he so desperately craves, where someone else understands and nothing has to be said for the weight to lift. There is no end, no closure; he thinks to reach for a pencil, to write a letter to someone who will never receive it, to say things he would be jailed for revealing. He tried it once; he used up a notebook with all the things he wanted to say to his brother, and then he threw it on the fire so he would get another few minutes of warmth without having to go out to the woodpile. He pretended that the sparks were a message, somehow, as they popped and hissed; an ember flew out and landed on the rug, burning out by his slippers. What his brother would say, though, he could never hope to know, even in the dreams where he's forgiven a thousand times over.

He thinks he could quite possibly go mad, but even if he could go to someone, it just wouldn't do to be seen like that, to be looked down on and whispered about, until that was what pushed him over an unforeseen precipice and he was taken away and the thoughts shocked from his head leaving nothing behind, not even his work.

 

The position in America comes as a surprise; he's had invitations, but Cornell offer more than a speaking tour or a month or two of seminars. He thinks to stay, near his mother's grave and his brother's cross, but he risks reaching out, and John tells him he'd be a fool to stay; of all of them, he deserved the most, John said. The reasons went unsaid, like so many things between them. On the plane, looking out over sea that seemed without end, he thought it might have been something more; of all of them, he was the one who lost the most, who was still young enough to change course after, and that was all it could be. Perhaps, if things had been different, maybe, but John had seen him fall low, had been there and knew, and would always know; like their notes, their proofs and their ciphers, the knowing wouldn't exist anywhere but their minds, but it would always be there. The thing that would bind them would tear them apart, instead of the weight being shared he knows it would only double with every reminder, however small, however subtle. He would never have those moments where it is as if he has forgotten, and he is weightless, almost happy, because, like those above him at Oxford who knew where he spent the war though not what he did, like what's left of his family and life before, John would always look at him as someone who has lost, not someone ready to become more than what the war left behind.

 

At Cornell, if the sun is right and there's a light drizzle, if he squints just so and tilts his head, he can pretend he's back there, before it all happened, before their scribbles and that machine changed everything, before what he did mattered to thousands of people. 

At Cornell, he doesn't have to.


End file.
